78 Responses

I'm down in Wellington (Parliament is sitting) so I've been relying on friends, family and FB for updates on where there's power, or not. My husband txted on Tuesday evening at about 9pm to tell me the power had gone out. It came back on this morning at about 8.20am. So nearly 36 hours without power, and not a lot of information about when it might come back on.

Some places in my electorate are still without power and they're not expecting to get it back until tomorrow (Friday) sometime. That seems... odd, given that it's a very urban electorate. We did seem to be right in the wind tunnel, with the winds barrelling in over the Manukau, and there were outages seemingly everywhere, so it's a huge task to get everything up and running again.

I'm wondering a bit about the resiliency of the power network. If we are going to face more and more weird weather, we might need to be thinking about how to build a stronger network.

Meanwhile in Morningside, no power, no appearance on the outage map, no ability to register the outage and no clue as to likely resolution time. The infrequent utterances from Vector ask for patience and indicate incoming weather this afternoon may slow things down. The comms and social media team at Vector need to do better.The ecosystem around here has stalled. The mechanic where our car was scheduled for a checkup before a school break, down country jaunt is shut down. The sewing shop that has our master bedroom curtains for alterations is shut down, thankfully wont be as cold tonight.Meanwhile...eating out for dinner and breakfast, and showers at powered friends. And trying not to think about what is going on in the fridge!

Meanwhile in Morningside, no power, no appearance on the outage map, no ability to register the outage and no clue as to likely resolution time. The infrequent utterances from Vector ask for patience and indicate incoming weather this afternoon may slow things down. The comms and social media team at Vector need to do better.

I have seen them acknowledge the outage to someone else in your neighbourhood on Twitter. But yeah, they should be able to do better than that.

Was going to comment on the blog, but can’t get my password. Anyway, to be fair to John Dragicevich, since he took over Civil Defence things are looking much better. He spoke to the Local Board about a month ago, and with considerable prescience pointed out that the threat in our area is a mega storm. This week is really just a taster and timely wake-up call. Under his direction, Emergency Management (as it’s now called) is turning around towards the community and seeking to engage with the community–hence his visit to talk to us. Just yesterday we discussed the community-strengthening programmes we have as a Local Board–our Neighbours Day grants and Eco-Neighbourhoods were Albert-Eden Local Board initiatives that are now being copied elsewhere–and how we can extend supplement these to increase community resilience. We have always been conscious of the need to strengthen community linkages, as you know, and resilience has been a factor there. But I’ll admit that civil defence hasn’t been as high a priority as it might have been, as we’ve all tended to think about earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis (you’re safe in Pt Chevalier BTW). At least it should be easier to engage people now to the dangers from a much more likely mega-storm.

I avoided opening the fridge and freezer until last night, for obvious reasons. We seem to have got through okay there, which is a relief – it's a full freezer

We didn't open the freezer until the power came back on after 18 hours off, and when I checked the ice cream it wasn't even soft. It would appear that new modern fridges can retain their cool for quite some time - I guess the drop in air temperature helped.

Emergency Management (as it’s now called) is turning around towards the community and seeking to engage with the community

Yes, Dragecevich started that in the old Waitakere City Council. The idea is to strengthen connections within local communities before they need to be drawn upon in emergencies. Takes lots of time and effort.

I may be mistaken but my impression is that Auckland has far more frequent and serious power outages than Wellington or Christchurch. Does anyone know if there is a reason why the distribution network is more vulnerable there? It's not unknown for Wellington to have the odd storm, and it's not unusual for there to be lines down somewhere, but nothing like this scale.

The UFB rollout was a massive lost opportunity for undergrounding/shared ducting of services.

On my street the Fibre is underground on 1 side of the street then run up the power poles, strung across the street, tethered to my copper phone line and run into the gable of my house, along the inside of my roof space, then down the outside of the house in a conduit, under the house and then up into the house at the point required

I'm sort of an unofficial Civil Defense node for my neighborhood. I have a petrol generator and being a micro ISP for about 20ish households when things go tits up like a power cut everyone comes over to cook on the bbq/use my radio or sat phone.

I've always felt that we should build resilience into people *and* infrastructure.

A little bit of a gale and the lights on my road go out - this happens quite regularly and it usually takes a few days to fix them. But not power generally. Can't remember the last power outage in Wellington but it would have been since the Wahine storm (which at three days was the longest I can recall experiencing).

When the Franklin Rd upgrade was being worked through Vector was the only service who wouldn’t come to the party. They said they wouldn’t underground the power. The residents politely informed them to reconsider before we launched a PR firestorm on them (having Bill and Janet in the street has advantages!). Needless to say by the time the next meeting had come around they had agreed to do the work.

No, I believe 'best practice' (for Chorus at least) is to remove the copper phone lines least some crazy government try and split the copper/fibre monopoly to create some competition in local internet providers (at least they came down my street and removed all the copper after they installed the fibre)

They would have done this for the scrap value of copper - when I worked for the Post Office, as a technician, in the 1970s, I was told that more than 60% of the asset value of the network was in the copper wiring.